MANCHESTER — — Town police officers on Thursday handed over a check for $27,890.35 to the founder of the Newtown Memorial Fund.

Representing the Manchester Police Benevolent Association, patrol officers, detectives and dispatchers volunteered their time to sell custom-designed shirts for $10 each. The end total from the fundraiser was an odd figure, police Sgt. Michael Ilewicz said, because "even little kids were giving spare change out of their pockets."

Accepting the check at a news conference at the Baymont Inn & Suites on Taylor Street, Newtown Memorial Fund founder Brian Mauriello said it was one of the largest amounts donated to the nonprofit organization.

"It's flabbergasting," Mauriello said.

The fund now totals about $1.1 million and is meant, first and foremost, to support the victims' families and first responders and to build a memorial to the 20 children and six adults slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mauriello said.

The Manchester effort began on Dec. 20, shortly after the massacre on Dec. 14. Manchester officers had joined other police from around the state to help the overwhelmed Newtown force in the days after the shootings. Volunteer cops directed traffic, accompanied funeral processions and filled in where needed.

But llocal officers who were unable to get to the grief-stricken town felt they, too, needed to help, and the idea of rasing money through T-shirt sales was born.

The shirts bore a design by Christie Staiger, graphic designer at T-Shirts Etc. in Glastonbury. The design incorporated the Sandy Hook school colors of green and white and included a green eagle, two teardrops falling from its right eye, cradling a teddy bear in its wings. The letters S.H.E.S. crown the design.

Staiger said at the news conference that the design was "an emotional item to create." The eagle, she said, represents both the Sandy Hook mascot and the school's heroic teachers.

The shirts were available at several Manchester businesses, and police officers volunteered to sell them each weekend night from Dec. 20 to Feb. 20 at the Funny Bone Comedy Club on Buckland Hills Drive, Ilewicz said.

When the effort began, organizers figured they would buy 300 T-shirts at wholesale cost (thanks to T-Shirts Etc.) and sell as many as they could, Ilewicz said. But the cause and the eagle design proved popular, and sales were brisk. Also, many people donated money without buying shirts, Ilewicz said.

The Newtown Memorial Fund's mission, according to a statement at http://www.newtownmemorialfund.org, is to create a sustainable fund "to provide for the immediate and ongoing needs of those affected by the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, to construct a physical memorial honoring the lives lost on Dec. 14, 2012, and to establish academic scholarships in the victims' names for future generations of Newtown students."